“If you wish to fly high, beyond the incessant dialogue of the mind, Mindfulness is your path.” (SCW)
What is meditation?
Meditation is a secular path, suitable for everyone—from children to the elderly—who wishes to improve their quality of life.
We often think of meditation as something that takes us elsewhere, into a state of calm and tranquility.
It is true that meditation can be calming, but it is not another form of relaxation. Meditation is not a warm bath surrounded by scented candles and incense. Practicing meditation means consciously embracing all mental states, without preferring one over another. It is an invitation to move beyond a common and often superficial association: negative event = bad, positive event = good. We have all experienced negative events that later revealed themselves as important turning points and successes. Meditation therefore invites us to suspend immediate judgment.
Mindfulness (or mindfulness meditation) brings us face to face with things as they are: sometimes the sea is stormy, or the weather is bad. Our mood, too, is as unpredictable as the sea. Mindfulness teaches us to recognize that when the sea is rough and the waves are high, our boat is in motion and we cannot flatten the waves. Mindfulness helps us develop a steady rudder for storms, but it does not deny the existence of storms, nor does it make them disappear by magic.
While the term mindfulness generally refers to meditation as it meets psychology, imaginal mindfulness refers to meditation as it meets imaginal psychology—that is, the psychology initiated in the West by C.G. Jung (with analytical psychology) and later reworked by the American psychoanalyst, essayist, and philosopher James Hillman (with archetypal psychology). In the imaginal perspective, the body and the world are internal to the psyche. This paradigm no longer considers the body within a functional and perceptual reality, but rather as a “symbol.”
Imaginal mindfulness works on dissolving attachments and fears that prevent us from living in truth. The practices of Imaginal Meditation guide us to perceive that matter does not exist as an objective reality and that everything is dream and image.
Imaginal mindfulness teaches us to elevate disturbances, problems, and discomforts, to listen to them as voices of the soul calling us to an inner journey into the underworld, the chthonic dimension, in order to return to us our wild energies.
